[ISEA2002] Artists Statement: Eder Santos & Paulo Sérgio dos Santos – Pincelulas

Artists Statement

The performance by these two Brazilian creators incorporates different features including video, poetry and music, played live by the authors. The title Pincelulas derives from a combination of Portuguese words which convey the fundamental messages in this work: pincel (brush), the painting instrument; cellula (cell), the basic unit of all Living species and pincelada (stroke), the painters manifestation. The performance’s objective is to tell the story of human development, from its physical inception to its emotional constitution, attempting to address each of the three stages of life: embryo, formation, birth and growth; intellect and senility. Eder Santos has become a respected personality as a producer and video artist in the Brazilian and international communities. Since 1989, he has been presented in various festivals and museums in Brazil, Europe and the United States. Eder Santos produces commercial work and videoclips with famous Brazilian musicians on a regular basis. Paulo Sergio dos Santos, by the other hand, also born in Belo Horizonte, bring his vast experience as a musician to their cooperative work: he was a percussionist with the Minas Gerais Simphony Orchestra for nine years and has been part of the well-known UAKTI musical group since its inception 19 years ago. With a series of concerts throughout these years, UAKTI has been acclaimed and admired by an eclectic public in the United States, Canada, Japan and most of Europe. He has been the constant composer of music and soundtrack for Mer Santos videos and installations.

Brazilian videomaker Eder Santos creates vibrant, poetic works that merge the personal, the cultural and the technological to reinterpret motifs that are central to Brazil’s African, indigenous and European heritage. Evoking the rhythms and textures of memory and history, he crafts a visual language of high-end and low-end technologies, from digital media to Super-8 film. As a Brazilian artist, Santos is acutely aware of the socioeconomic relation of technological media and cultural representation: “I have never lost sight of the fact that I am using a technology rather foreign to my city and country – in short, there is a gap in the relation between the social and the technological. As a consequence, I always attempt to use our own cultural elements.” In the vivid UAKTI-Bolero (1987). Santos’ electronic rendering of a musical performance, Ravel’s Bolero has been interpreted in terms of a Brazilian sensibility. Rite & Expression (1988) is a televisual reconstruction of 17th-century Baroque architecture, religious syncretism and African cultural rituals. Europe in Five Minutes (1986) and I Cannot Go to Africa Because I Am on Duty (1990) address the use of technological media as modes of cultural “documentation”. States Santos, “I use technology to express visual and tactile sensations, moods and feelings. I aim at creating a private world that is both an inner and an outer reality.”